Why Erich von Däniken Is A Criminal and Dangerous Fraudster

None of what Erich von Däniken asserts to be true is actually true. He is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, a million times wrong. Yet again when you scratch the surface of a UFOlogy luminary you find the dirty grimy truth. He is a proven conman, von Däniken was convicted for embezzlement and tax evasion shortly after the publication of Chariots of the Gods. He also had to admit that he had forged some of his “ancient” artefacts allegedly depicting alien visitors.

You can sum up Däniken’s nonsense in this fashion:

“Behold these awesome* buildings, scientific achievements, and art produced by the (name any non-white people)! It is evident that they could not have produced it themselves. This is evidence that they were contacted by Aliens! Däniken defines “awesome” as anything that impresses him. They couldn’t because they are inferior to the Great White Race that monopolizes awesomeness.”

His whole literary (term used loosely) repertoire is based on arguments from incredulity, not-very-well-disguised racism (von Däniken seems to believe that only modern white people are capable of innovation, imagination, or great feats of engineering), and lots of random made-up bullshit.

It is ignorant because he jumps to easy conclusions without fact-checking or, sometimes, even without considering the usual explanation. He always wants to find his explanation, which means he intentionally ignores all previous research, replacing it with his makeshift “explorations” and “findings”.

It is racist because it implies that people outside Europe are primitive, brutish, stupid or awkward. The ancient Egyptians, for instance, were so idiotic that they couldn’t even pile up stones to make monuments… when, actually, piling up stones is simply the easiest way to make something high and outstanding with low technology. Pyramids are not awesome, they’re just big and old. There are pyramids in other places of the world because the idea of piling up stones is just too… easy to come by.

And it is a simplification “for the masses” because he wants to sell books, and sucker the gullible readers. History Channel is “Däniken on steroids”.

Däniken can be argued to have made the single most damaging attack in serious historical research since Nazi book-burning or the Roman Catholic Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum. He created the “aliens did it” idea and made it appear like a theory. What could have been just unimaginative science-fiction was then believed by some simple people as an actual theory of History.

His explanation for the origin of ancient monuments such as the Egyptian pyramids or the Nazca lines fails Occam’s Razor quite spectacularly, and while such feats are indeed impressive for bronze age people, one would expect a highly advanced civilization capable of interstellar travel to come up with something a little better. Moreover, if these aliens were indeed benevolent and tried to help humans (as von Däniken claims), one wonders how they got the idea that what humanity needed most were huge piles of intricately arranged rocks instead of stuff like modern medicine and energy sources. After littering the landscape with strange buildings and messing with the humans’ minds, the aliens apparently vanished, leaving no trace of their technology.

In the book (paper) “The Cult of Alien Gods: H.P. Lovecraft And Extraterrestrial Pop Culture“. This book demonstrates that von Däniken is a person of low moral character and little intellectual originality. In a nutshell, he’s a clever crook. Sound harsh? He has the prison record to prove it. Here’s an excerpt :

Erich Anton Paul von Däniken was born in Switzerland in 1935, raised a strict Catholic, and in Catholic school developed an interest in UFOs, like many youths in the early 1950s. He had a criminal record. He was convicted of theft when he was 19, and he left school to become a hotelier. He was convicted of embezzlement after leaving that job. He took another hotel position, and he stole money there, too, by falsifying records in order to obtain tens of thousands in fraudulent loans to finance his interest in space aliens and what the court later called his “playboy lifestyle.” The court psychiatrist declared him a pathological liar. Eventually, he would be convicted of embezzlement and fraud yet again, serving a year in prison.

In 1960, two French authors who were interested in the occult, Nazis, UFOs, and H. P. Lovecraft put out a book called Morning of the Magicians in which they tried to show that Lovecraft’s vision of ancient astronauts could be correlated to the “occult” truths of Theosophy and the UFO movement. Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels put together the entire case for ancient astronauts as we currently know it—from the claims about ancient atom bombs to the claims about “impossibly” precise and heavy stone architecture. Their book inspired several by Robert Charroux, who presented Bergier’s and Pauwel’s discursive, disorganized ideas in a more popular and readable format.

In 1964, von Däniken simply appropriated this material wholesale for a magazine article, and on the strength of the magazine article, he received a book deal for what became Chariots of the Gods …

His brain droppings are rightfully so considered offensive and intellectual abuse to an actual historian. When History graduates and\or undergrads meet, they often talk about their dream of being allowed to tar and feather all who take Däniken’s books seriously.

He is just another example of the long line of known and provable fraudsters. Bottom feeders like him take all his readers for fools and morons. He knows he is lying and fabricating evidence. He knows what he is doing and does not care. He is all about the money and the accolades from his duped readers.

He has a fraud heir apparent… Giorgio A. Tsoukalos. You may know him as the human toilet. Another fraudster that only cares about the money. Co-founder of Legendary Times magazine which was last published in 2008. No conflict of interest there right?

People must learn that television and movies are just entertainment NOT education. I would have no problem with fraudsters and conmen like Däniken and his ilk besides for the fact that they present their contrived nonsense as the truth. Unfortunately, it appears that the majority of people have defective bullshit detectors. To put it nicely. So many people believe that the whack-a-doodle ancient aliens hypothesis (yes it is a hypothesis, not a theory) is the true reality in which we inhabit. IT IS NOT!

The Ancient Aliens Hypothesis is just an uneducated conman’s dream scam. Don’t fall for it. Just think about it clearly for a few seconds. Twelve seasons of the complete bullshit disinformation TV show ‘Ancient Aliens’, each show with 3-4 different segments and still NOT ONE SHRED OF CREDIBLE EVIDENCE AT ALL. Not a single actual historian (those people that actually went to school and were held to high standards of truth and investigation) believe any of it. It is just the armchair types that follow these frauds. Remember someone’s ignorance is NOT equal to another person’s education.

Don’t despair the real Universe and its alien inhabitants when it does become clear and disclosed will not disappoint. The Universe is grander than we comprehend, grander than we can comprehend.

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